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[crashpaddiaries]

Dear Crashpad Diary #28

Helllllllooooooo my favorite beasts of the entire world!!

How´s going there?? Hope you´re ready for the summer and the outdoors season!! hahahahahaha

well… now I understand when some people defend that cold weather is better for climbing… after months of hot-boiling weather in SEA, I came to a conclusion that, summer in these places is not suitable for even a living, actually…. freaking hot hahahah I'm right now writing and dehidrating as I´m sweating hahahah

Today I´ll write about: Loads of falls, getting better on surfing, that´s why I don´t like policemen, drinking coffee that just came out of an animal´s ass, photo pranks, earthquakes…

I´m seriously having fun here while learning how to surf!! We´re currently in Bali and we´ve been going to some beaches that are better for learners and cookies hahaha The problem is that, when you are learning from someone that already knows what the story is, sometimes you lack some good information!! hahah The first morning we´ve gone inside the ocean I had a big board with good flotation… therefore… the thing would not dive right?!?! Yep!!

So there is no need to tell ya that whenever a huge wave was coming and I tried to dive with the board it would not work and I would go inside the wave in a washing machine state hahahah After 3 or 4 big waves I kinda felt that sth was wrong and I had to change the strategy!! ahahahaha

Ever since I almost died in Patagonia due to a sudden snowstorm allied to my excess of confidence I have always been afraid of nature and it´s power… maybe the ocean is the one that scares me the most… so… after all those huge waves, I was decided to leave the ocean and rest for a bit (or for days) at the beach… but my bro came and told me how to deal with them and it is actually pretty ok… you don´t feel like dying the whole time hehehehe And after that I could focus on standing up hahahahah which I did just after 4 hours… or 3 days…. not sure… I´m not controlling the time here!! hahahaha

Once in Bali, the rice fields and Ubud area are a must-see attraction… off we went then… We rented a bike… got my camera and all the stuff and venga!! 
 BTW… we have been using an app called Maps.me which is absolutely fantastic! you can use all the maps offline and download all the countries or areas you might need… freeeeeaking nice!! That saved us many times on the trip!!

And there we were… maps on one hand… Luh driving…. we had like 40kms in front of us… everything was fine till the time we got to a big avenue and the policemen stopped us… to check the docs… funny though that they were stopping only tourists…

As soon as he stopped us… Luh gave him the drivers license and all the motorbikes documents that were in pristine conditions as the bike was Wayan´s one, from the hotel we were staying… Anyways… does not matter if that was ok or not… they were stopping only tourists to get money out of them… they came with a story that the driver´s license was not valid here and bla bla bla… the police guy brought us to the corner and said that we would have to “fix the mistake”… we tried to discuss a bit but he asked for 500.000 rupees… we said we did not have, which was true, cuz who´d go out for a day trip in a place like this carrying the daily budget?? haha

He asked 50% then, and we said no… but in the end he got 150.000 from us and let us go…. fucker!! =(

Later that week we met some locals that told us it is pretty common… you only need to put like 50.000 inside the motorbike´s documents when you hand it off, they will take the money and let you go with no harm… it´s sad to see things like this happening tho!!

Forgetting about this shit happen… people like this policemen cannot dictate the way you face or remember the day… I just decided to write about to help people avoiding losing money for nothing!! 

The trip that day was awesome… the rice fields were beautiful an huge… even after living in Hampi and having its great rice paddies as a constant background… I still have the capacity of fall in love with rice fields around the world… they seem to get greener and more vivid as the life goes on!! heheh

Something funny happened that day in the fields… funny for us… cuz for that lady twas not funny at all!! hahahah She was being photographed… and suddenly, she was covered by the mud and surrounded by rice hahahahah Yep… she fell inside one of the fields… and all the people present in that valley that day will remember the scared noise that one of her family member made as she collapsed!!

I can only imagine what happened: “Let´s take a pic people… Grandma… one step back… another one…. one last step for a better position!!”…. Grandmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa….. hahahahahhahaha

Poor thing!! She was rescued fast without major injuries… she fell prob around 3 metres… but her clothes…. hahahaha I´m laughing but twas not funny for her… clothes!! RIP white shirt!! hahahahah

The next matter might sound a little awkward and maybe disgusting for some of yous…. but it was a valid, different and, I risk to say, delicious experience!! Someone had already told me about the most expensive coffee ever… a coffee that somewhat was extracted from an animal´s poo!! hahah And the best part of the story… it was somewhere in Indonesia!! hahaha

It happened to be in that area.. in Ubud… place where the animals were kept in captive… feed by the human and, after all the digestive process, the poo would be collected, roasted, ground and served as the most expensive coffee on earth… I have to agree that the coffee is indeed good… but as all the good coffee I´ve ever taken… Colombian, Brazilian, Kenyan… all of them were great too!!

So… I have been trying to understand why we keep these animals in a cage to make sth that we have already mastered without them?? Maybe it is a way to add some different value to the product.. but is it worthy?? dunno…

It seems that the human being have a fetich for the animals asses though!! Some time ago a friend of mine told me that vanilla flowers are extremely rare, therefore, original vanilla flavour is costly… reason why all the big companies found a way to artificially replace it… and the way they found, involves something found on otter´s asses…. seriously??? First you get the vanilla from the otter ass and now the coffee from the Luwak ass????

Can you imagine what would be a Luwak vanilla coffee then!! hahahahahaha

Well… with the unpredicted bribe expense, we decide to save some money using the app Tripadvisor to get info on cheap places to eat and all… silly mistake!! They have a way to rate the restaurants with € symbols… if the place has one symbol is cheap and so on…

It was easy for me and Luh to choose…. the ones with more than € were automatically out of scope hehe Unfortunately and fortunately, they have some sort of trouble to define what is cheap and expensive… cuz the cheap stuff they define was overpriced … that's the unfortunate part… cuz we walked to few of them for 2 or 3 times… got there starving and had to abort the mission because of the prices…. However… and that's where the fortunate part comes… we got to find some nice, delish and cheap local places!!! Yummy and in your face trip advisor!! don´t like ya!! haha odds of using apps haha

Talking about odds…. what are the odds of going to bed thinking out of the blue about tsunamis and thinking what would be the best action plan for us if that happened (I know… it's weird but it was pretty random thought) and wake up the next morning with an earthquake???

Weird, isn’t it??? I know!!

Maybe because of the thought of the previous night… I woke up, got out of bed and opened the door to leave the room in a split of second… when I opened the door my brother woke up and while he was trying to understand what was going on I told him to leave fast…. by that time we had few more secs of shakiness and then it stopped… checking the internet few mins later I could confirm that it happened 35km from our place and it was quite strong… 6.10 on the Richter scale!! wow… one can freak out when the safety of the ground vanishes that sudden!! I can remember the soundtrack of it all was provided by some old ladies that kept yelling for the whole length!! haha

In that same website… earthquaketrack.com, I saw that you can register to receive earthquake alerts on twitter!! hahahaha Imagine that… you get an alert like: “Holy Shit…. run!!!!” or “Fuck fuck fuck fuck!!” or even “Good night Mr. Jones, We´d like to let you know that in few mins from now you´ll feel like you´re losing it… don´t worry… it´s all good… if you live your home and head to a park or some sort of open air area like… NOW!! 

or... even the classic Douglas Adams advice: “Don´t panic!!” hahahahahaha

Sweeeeeet!! I hope you had good fun with this post… all the stories and infos are true, even the paragraph that I say I did get up on a surfboard!! hahahah

All the best smiles and sweet vibes from the great Indonesia!!

oh… and if you´re thinking about grabbing your backpack and travel the world… let me know…. I might join you somewhere!! =)

Cheers and good trip!!


Evan